1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates in general to a distributed computing system, particularly to a system that allows users to subscribe and/or publish content on a network.
2. Description of Related Art
As more and more computers are connected via the Internet or a network such as an intranet or wide-area-network (WAN), resources such as databases, software applications, hardware devices, and electronic appliances can be shared among users within a network. Within this network system, resources are utilized in creating content such as reports, pictures, documents, databases, web-pages, and etc. Each type of content can be produced by various application tools and saved in various data formats. Thus, in order to share content created, “content subscribers,” users or components that want to view or access content, either need to have all the resources required to view the content or have a converter that converts un-viewable data format to viewable data format. For example, in order for a Microsoft Office Suite user to view content created by a WordPerfect user, a converter is utilized to convert a Word Perfect file to a Word document. However, often various formatting attributes are lost in the conversion. Another approach is to have both Word Perfect and Microsoft Office Suite on ones' computer so that the user can view both file types. However, this is redundant and creates both a financial burden and occupies valuable memory space.
Similarly, a problem arises for “content publishers,” users or components that want to generate the content, as each content publishing resource have different attributes that content publishers may want to utilize. For example, in creation of animation, software 1 may have good graphic capability while software 2 may have better simulation capability for rendering. In order to produce an animated scene, an animator may want to use the graphic capability of software 1 and the simulation capability of software 2. However, he may not have the resources to purchase both pieces of software or he may only need to use the software for a limited amount of time.
Therefore, it is advantageous to have an extendible and flexible system to allow content subscribers to share content and content publishing resources.